I have postcard on my listening den wall bearing the caption "If you not annoying your neighbours, you are listening to the wrong music". This album is guaranteed to annoy plenty.
With 'Splintered Metal Sky', the male-female art-fuzz power duo - Dave W. & Ego Sensation - fully demonstrate why 'White Hills' were chosen as the after hours/after-life band in Jim Jarmusch's brilliant 2013 vampire spoof movie 'Only Lovers Left Alive'.
Jarmusch himself has a cameo role here on the ear shredding closing track, Illusion . Lebanese singer, Yasmine Hamdan, who sang 'Hal' in the movie, gets a role too on RAts
The album, recorded in Brooklyn's Studio G with Psychic TV guitarist/engineer Jeff Berner, is a savage mash-up of Goth Rock and Industrial Metal. Vocally, it's the kind of sound that might result if the ghost of Marc Bolan met with Marilyn Manson. Digital Trash is 'Solid Gold Easy Action' with razor blades.
This is music for the blasted world we were forewarned about in Dylan's 'A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall': "the sound of a thunder that roared out a warning ..........where black is the colour and none is the number."
The bass heavy riffs, urban field recordings, distorted vocals, white noise and guitar abuse are by turns thrilling and as scary as fuck. The PR states soberly that it is "about oscillation and evolution" but 'distortion and destruction' would be more on the nose.
Have No Fear - this feral punk rock is the sound of the world falling apart.
